A Cool Quote

This is a quote from a peice I am reading for my Comm 480 - Exploring Social Advocacy class.  It is from In a Time of Crisis  written by Dave Forman.  I think it is important:

"Eighty years ago, Aldo Leopold graduated from the Yale School of Forestry and went to work for the newly created United States Forest Service in the territories of Arizona and New Mexico. He was put to work inventorying potential timber resources in the high, wild White Mountains of eastern Arizona, which were a great roadless area then. One day Leopold stopped for lunch with his crew on a rimrock overlooking a turbulent stream. As they ate, they saw a large animal ford the rillito. They thought at first it was a doe, but as a rolling bunch of pups came out of the willows to greet their mother, they realized it was a wolf. In those days, a wolf you saw was a wolf you shot. Leopold and his men hurriedly pulled their .30-30s from the scabbards on their horses and began to blast away. The wolf dropped, a pup dragged a shattered leg into the rocks, and Leopold rode down to finish the job. He later wrote:

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunter’s paradise. But after seen the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Green fire. We need it in the eyes of the wolf. We need it in the land. And we need it in our own eyes."